There are so many special days and events coming up, it's hard to know where to start.

April is National Poetry Month. With grades DK, K, 2nd, 4th, and 5th I will be reading poetry books. Thursday, April 14, is Poem-in-Your-Pocket Day. The library is creating a poster of students (or grown-ups!) who choose to participate. Bring your poem Monday through Thursday to be photographed for the poster, and enjoy sharing your poem with others on Thursday. Create your own poem with the "Instant Poetry Forms" online poetry generator (from Educational Technology Training Center).

April is also School Library Month, and April 10 to 16 is National Library Week. Grades 1 and 3 will be hearing books about libraries this week. In particular, Wednesday is National Bookmobile Day, so the choice for grade 3--That Book Woman, by Heather Henson--has extra relevance. Started in the 1930s as part of the Works Progress Administration, the Pack Horse Library Project, (the subject of That Book Woman) brought books to individuals and small communities in the Appalachian mountains of Kentucky. Today hundreds of bookmobiles across the United States serve small and rural communities, and library books are carried elsewhere in the world by bus, by boat, and on the backs of camels and elephants (as illustrated in My Librarian Is a Camel, by Margriet Ruurs).

Next Wednesday, April 20, the library book club for students in grades 4 and 5 meets. Club members, please finish our selection--Keeper, by Kathi Appelt, before the meeting.

Next week (April 18 to 24) is also Screen-Free Week (sometimes referred to as Screen-Time Awareness Week and formerly as TV Turnoff Week). During this week people are urged to turn off their screens and enjoy other activities: have a picnic, ride a bike, play a board game, take a walk, or just have a conversation--there are a lot of fun activities that don't involve using a screen. You could even read a book!

Finally, acclaimed author D. J. MacHale (writer of the Pendragon series and The Monster Princess) will be appearing on April 19 at 7:00 p.m. at Pages: A Bookstore, located at 904 Manhattan Avenue, in downtown Manhattan Beach. This event takes place on the publication date of Book 2: The Black, the next volume in MacHale's new Morpheus Road series, so it should be a packed house and a really exciting evening. If you have never taken your son or daughter to meet a real-live author, this might be just the event, especially for students from grade 4 through high school, to whom the Pendragon and Morpheus Road series tend to appeal.

Barbara Siegemund-Broka, library media specialist, maintains this blog to inform Pennekamp students and families about library news and related content. Any opinions expressed here are solely her own.

What's Ms. Barbara reading?

Song for a Whale,​ by Lynne Kelly​

﻿Worth repeating:﻿

​"In my 'Mending Wall' was my intention fulfilled with the characters portrayed and the atmosphere of the place? […] I should be sorry if a single one of my poems stopped with either of those things—stopped anywhere in fact. My poems—I should suppose everybody's poems—are all set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless. Ever since infancy I have had the habit of leaving my blocks, carts, chairs, and such like ordinaries where people would be pretty sure to fall forward over them in the dark. Forward, you understand, and in the dark. I may leave my toys in the wrong place and so in vain. It is my intention we are speaking of—my innate mischievousness."

Quoted in Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance, by George Monteiro